Today, in a post by the New York Times. , they had an interesting topic on online advertising. What this post will focus on is Google’s comments on their text-based ad system.

“..online publishers may be getting less money for the ad space they do sell. The prices paid for online ads bought through ad networks dropped 23 percent from March to April, according to PubMatic, an advertising-technology company in Palo Alto, Calif., that runs an online-pricing index”. Personally, I feel that from talking with friends they offer a better suggestion: People just don’t like the type of banners they are seeing. I’ll blog about how bad banner ads(and what I believe that is) do more to turn users away from buying products in a latter post & how they could be done much more effectively.

So, here is the clincher! “In the most recent quarter, Google had a profit of $1.31 billion on revenues of $5.19 billion. Its United States revenue was up 30 percent from last year”(source NYT). This is Google’s ad words basically, this is what SEO runs counter to! Search Engine Optimization is nothing more than an ad words free way of advertisement. You arn’t paying for the pay per click, rather, you are paying for your site to be on the first page; preferably in first place for a designated keyword. Companies when looking for a better way to advertise move towards a more measurable method of advertisement, which is no surprise, online marketing(display ads, SEO & all that encompasses SEM). Thus, when companies are shrinking their advertising budgets away from print media, radio, T.V. media; they find a real, measurable return from online advertising.

Other, factors though should be examined, which I hope the industry as a whole is no overlooking. The fact of the WGA(Writers Guild of America) strike. When, new content is not being put into a market you basically are not giving the consumer reason to, in this case, turn on. This sort of delay of new content lasted roughly four months. The best case scenario would have been to hope for a rather large, news worthy, story to develop, and advertise on the nightly news. The nightly news could at least expect X amount of viewers a night, although, due to the internet blogs, news outlets this number is shrinking too. The other option would have been to advertise during a sporting event, however, for most small business that could afford commercial time, this wouldn’t have been a viable option.

While, data from the NYT story does not support companies are going directly towards SEO, I can’t help, but, ask “why are companies not invesesting more heavily in SEO. When the banner market not showing such positive results?”. When a company spends money towards an ad word, they decide to bid on key word. Then, they must fork over money even when this ad word does not yield a buying customer. While, this does in fact happen with SEO you are not paying for a useless click, every click has some measurable result even when evaluating your just evaluating an answer to “why did that potential customer leave?” Don’t get me wrong, our SEO company always evaluates why a cluster of visitors are not buyers from SEM tactics, such as banner ads & organic placement(SEO), but, you are not paying $0.01 cents to $5.00 dollars per click either. Every SEM campaign we manage we make sure the customer has excellent SEO keywords in place, before moving onto a more expensive SEM campaign.

Well, its getting late & my writing is suffering. Just remember this, in a market such as this for the internet community, in advertising Search Engine Optimization will hold its own through good cycles & bad. So, sorry for the sloppy post. In the least, I hope you enjoyed some of the information presented. To all a Good Night.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under General SEO Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.